


Frostbite

by lamoamadeen



Category: Gokusen - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-04
Updated: 2012-12-04
Packaged: 2017-11-20 07:45:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/582969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lamoamadeen/pseuds/lamoamadeen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe this isn't something you do, when you just got your best friend back, and he's being altruistic on an empty stomach, and you just want to express your... appreciation. Maybe Ryu should've gone for a shoulder bump, as he used to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Frostbite

**Author's Note:**

  * For [solo____ (Solo)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solo/gifts).



> This is the still unbetaed but slightly edited version of an unbetaed birthday fic(-let) I wrote for [Solo](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Solo).

This isn't the first time Ryu has shown up unannounced on the Yabuki doorstep, so Taku doesn't bat an eyelash as he opens the door at eight in the evening to Ryu's curt "Yo!" and a decided lack of Hayato.

Taku grins. "So what's it this time?" He leans past the doorframe and peers down the hallway. "Let me guess—he got distracted by some school uniforms on the way from the station? Old Monzaki-san's holding him hostage again until he apologizes for our abominable trash-sorting skills?"

Ryu shakes his head, and holds up the two plastic bags that have been cutting their way into his palms since he left the supermarket. "Ain't coming," he says. "Not for a while. Okay to come in?"

Taku stares at the leek leaves poking out from one of the bags. "Is that what I think it is?" he asks, and his eyebrows creep up to his hairline. 

Ryu's seen this guy have his diapers changed. He refuses to feel—scratch that, he refuses to even name it. "You’re the smart one, you tell me."

"Don't sell yourself short, Ryu-chan," Taku says, stepping back to let him in. Probably calculating the chances of a bowl of soup for himself, the little monster. He blinks innocently. "When did you learn how to cook? Do they teach that at Kurogin now?"

Ryu ignores him and jams his feet into the battered grey guest slippers that have been around since middle school, when they used to seem universes too big. Now his heels keep dipping down to the floor, and he needs to curl his toes as he walks to get a grip. The one-hundred-yen-store down the street still sells the same slippers, even in Ryu's current size, but those wouldn't be the ones that earned Hayato a lecture on why you shouldn't scrawl _anything_ across the tip of your father's guest slippers with non-removable silver pen, not even your best friend's name.

Taku is undeterred. "But what's the occasion?" he asks, sliding ahead of Ryu and blocking the way to the kitchen. "You guys won a fight? You won the lottery? My brother figured out what he'll do after graduation?" He cocks his head. "You two getting married?"

" _You_ ," Ryu says, pushing past Taku with ease despite the overloaded plastic bags, "are a menace, and should win an academy award for that serious honor student thing you've got going on."

"I take it that means no comment?"

"It means get your math homework off the kitchen table or there won't be any soup for you."

 

\---

 

The key turns in the lock three hours later, with Ryu elbow-deep in soap bubbles and Taku, now pajama-clad, headed halfway across the kitchen to the bedroom.

"Good evening, older brother," Taku says, dead-pan-voiced, as Hayato stops in his tracks, one slipper dangling forgotten in his hands. "And goodnight, Ryu-chan. The food was great."

Hayato gapes after his brother's back, eyes flicking back and forth from Taku to Ryu, and it's only when the bedroom door slides shut that he snaps out of it, hollering, "That's still Ryu- _kun_ for you, dipshit!" 

Trying to hide his grin, Ryu focuses on the profound task of drying his hands without killing off the threadbare kitchen towel. Behind him, Hayato's school bag suffers through an unpleasant rendezvous with the floor. It's not an uncommon sound, so Ryu goes on to put away the dried-off pots. 

"Since when do you cook food for my brother?" The hostility in Hayato's voice, thought, is an uncommon sound. At least if you don't look past the last few weeks. 

Ryu raises his eyebrows. "For your _brother_? Come on Hayato, you being serious?"

Hayato's eyes widen with anger, a puffed-up rooster in need of a shower. "Who else for? He ate it!" He jerks his head at the bedroom door, the vertical and horizontal wisps his hairstyle has disintegrated into quivering angrily. Hayato's fringe is still pinned back as tightly as it was when Ryu left the restaurant.

Ungrateful wanker.

"Well, _someone_ said they were starving." Ryu throws the towel onto the dish rack. " _Someone_ said they would kiss a yak for a bowl of noodle soup, because _someone_ was helping at a ramen restaurant all day without getting a chance to eat, so _someone_ was whining to their friends for an hour about how unfair the world was and how they were all mean egotists for eating when _someone_ couldn't." Ryu turns the heat on high again, rips the lid off the simmering soup. "Excuse me if I listened." 

He's not blushing. He's not blushing. He's having subcutaneous vascular reactions to the heat of the steam, and this was stupid, anyway, stupid, and Hayato's—

"Um. I think I got it. Peace, please?"

"Stupid." 

Hayato shrugs sheepishly, and Ryu takes a decidedly unembarrassed breath. Wonders why Hayato gets him riled up so fast when things usually just sail past Ryu's hackles without even ruffling them. Maybe he shouldn't have asked Kuma for the ramen recipe. Maybe this isn't something you do, when you just got your best friend back, and he's being altruistic on an empty stomach, and you just want to express your... appreciation. Maybe Ryu should've gone for a shoulder bump, as he used to. 

Or maybe he should get himself under control and stop the fuck feeling embarrassed. There, done.

Hayato scratches his head. Sniffs his armpit. "Shower," he says, ducking his head, and Ryu's freshly established non-embarrassment flares into full-blown mortification as he realizes Hayato's having vascular reactions of his own going on. For a crazy second, he considers punching Hayato just to make the weirdness go away, but in the end he just slumps into a chair and pretends nobody's taking off clothes three steps and a wall away.

He used to be good at that. 

 

\---

 

By the time the water stops running, Taku's snores are sawing their way through the wall and Ryu has probably wriggled a dent into the kitchen chair trying to sprawl exactly as he usually sprawls. 

"Yo," Hayato says, closing the door on the steam behind him. Ryu wants to roll his eyes and say, _why are you greeting me, stupid,_ but Hayato, half-naked and flushed with heat from the shower, looks just as awkward as Ryu feels, making a hasty beeline for the bedroom door.

He stops short with one hand on the doorknob, the other gripping the towel he has slung around his neck. In the silence, the snores seem deafening. "Taku's asleep."

"Like the dead," Ryu says, because thumping his forehead onto the table in frustration is out. He goes for stoic nonchalance instead, but it crumbles as soon as one of Hayato's wet curls drips water past the towel, into the slope between his shoulder blades.

Hayato is trying to stare the door into submission. Or maybe his brother, through the door. Ryu is trying to stare at the tabletop. 

"My clothes," Hayato says. 

"Would wake him."

"Yeah. Still. I could. He's a brat anyway."

Ryu balls his hands to fists under the table, unclenches them again. Clothes have never mattered before. "Forget about it. I'll punch you if the soup gets cold."

Hayato's stomach rumbles on cue, and Ryu feels relief at the opportunity to get up, turn his back on the table, and avoid Hayato's eyes while he settles down. It's enough that Ryu can feel the hesitation oozing off Hayato in thick, pressing strands—no need to see it, too.

The soup is boiling viciously. Ryu curses and turns down the heat, throws in the noodles like Kuma said he should. 

"Smells like I'm back at work," Hayato says. Then adds hastily, "I mean, good, it smells good!"

"Kuma's recipe."

The chair scrapes along the floor. "He gave it to you!?"

"Yeah, in exchange for a signed confidentiality agreement."

Hayato snorts.

Ryu turns around, the ladle dripping in his hand. "No bullshit. I really did sign."

"Huh," Hayato says. "He must really like you."

"No, he really likes _you_. You saved his restaurant."

The noodles are finished. As Ryu pours them into a bowl and adds the meat and the leek, Hayato goes back to the demonstratively easy sprawling Ryu had failed at earlier. 

"Nah, Yankumi and her grandfather saved the restaurant. I got some bruises, that's all there is. But it was worth it," Hayato says and smiles that small, content smile Ryu won't admit to liking best, the one that has his lips seem even softer around the edges than they already are, the one where his eyes get that liquid warm sheen that seeps into Ryu's lungs, into his veins, pumps through his heart and back into the eyes he can never take off Hayato's face when he smiles like that. 

Ryu loves him. That's all there is.

"Be careful, it's hot," he says, and sets the bowl in front of Hayato.

Hayato readjusts the pin that holds his wet fringe back, rolls the chopsticks between his fingers. 

"What?" Ryu asks.

Hayato bites his lip. Then he chuckles. It sounds forced. "I don't know what I'm supposed to say."

Ryu doesn't, either. He's long past the point where he knows what's supposed, and what's not. "Idiot," he says. " _Thank you_ , what else?"

"Yeah, what else?" That chuckle again, sounds off, again. "Thank you, Ryu." And then Hayato turns to the soup so fast, slurps the first few noodles into his mouth so fast that Ryu can't even blink in warning before Hayato hisses with pain and spits everything back into the bowl.

"Fuckfuckfuck," Hayato scrambling for a glass of water, "owww fuck, that hurts, fuck," and Ryu jumps to his feet, throws open the refrigerator door, fumbling for the freezer compartment: "I told you it was hot!" and Hayato's gulping down water, gulping for air, feeling his lips and his tongue and the roof of his mouth with his fingers, "I thought you were just being polite! I think my whole mouth might blister," and Ryu knows the onset of a whiny tirade when he hears it so he takes out a couple of ice cubes, pushes Hayato back into the chair, and drops one into Hayato's hand. 

"Use that, Tsucchi swears on it for when he eats too fast." 

Putting an ice cube into Hayato's mouth is also a good means of silencing his chain of fuck's, but it doesn't get rid of the Very Much Suffering look on his face.

Ryu sighs. "Look, I'm sorry."

Hayato makes a grimace and spits the ice cube back into his palm. "Doesn't work. Some shitty advice Tsucchi gave you."

Ryu can't help but rolls his eyes. "Maybe keep it in for more than two seconds?"

Hayato glares. Attempt number two. Within the time it takes Ryu to sit down, Hayato has spit it quits again. "See! Bullshit, a whole load of it."

"Three seconds, Hayato, can't you just try it?" Ryu can feel a headache looming.

Another go, not much longer. "Impossible," Hayato says, halfway from a hiss to a whine, "too cold, too big, it bumps into my teeth." He drops the cube onto the table and gives it the finger. "What if I get frostbite on top of the blisters, huh, just because stupid Tsucchi thinks this works doesn't mean it works for me. Now my mouth is freezing _and_ burning and it's your fault—"

Ryu hisses, like a jammed camera snapping into action, ripping the view into zoomed-in focus as he gets right into Hayato's face, Hayato's jaw cupped by his hands, "freezing, huh?"—waits for Hayato's gaze to flicker down, for that one, dry, tell-tale swallow, and then his lips blaze warmth against Hayato's. Hayato gasps, a breath of chilled air Ryu lunges after, follows right past Hayato's lips, the sudden cold a shock to his tongue—he gathers it, caresses it, makes it retreat until he pulls away with his own lips less warm. 

Hayato shivers on every other inhale.

"That hurt?" Ryu asks, brushing his lips against Hayato's.

"No," and Hayato's hand slips up behind the curve of Ryu's ear, settles along the side of his head, spiders of warmth racing down Ryu's neck, and Ryu can breathe in rather than hear Hayato saying, "kinda the opposite." 

It throbs all the way down to his groin, has Ryu fumbling for the rejected ice cube, his fingertips going numb as he picks it up. When he sets it against Hayato's bare collarbone, Hayato stills. 

Slowly, slowly, ignoring how his own breath catches, Ryu trails the ice up along the hollow of Hayato's throat, up the side of his neck, watches him shiver, puffs air on the goose bumps spreading across moist skin. Up, up, up, past the edge of his jaw, and still Hayato doesn't flinch, just holds still as Ryu slowly covers Hayato's lips with a sheen of liquid ice. 

"Like that," Ryu breathes, leans in, and licks it off, "like that," as he pushes lightly, as Hayato's lips open around the ice and take it in, their warmth tight around Ryu's finger, the cube pricking cold needles into his fingertip, and then a warm, chilly _pull_ as Hayato's cheeks hollow, as his tongue swirls and bumps the cube against Ryu's skin.

"Hayato," Ryu manages, his pants too tight and his head dizzy like he's searing, burning up, a wreck of molten heat that gasps and shivers as Hayato laps and sucks, Hayato's name a scorching weight on his tongue. An arm across his back and he's pulled down into Hayato's lap, pushes into the towel stretched tight across Hayato's thighs, into the heat beneath, wants the chill that makes it burn hotter, wants, wants, wants, brands it along Hayato's throat with his lips and then they're kissing, open-mouthed and wet, feverish flickers of hot and cold, Hayato's hips bucking up into his, "please," Ryu's voice, begging, "please," and then he gets, a chilly blazing glide past his lips, and then icy coldness bursting across his tongue, Hayato meshing their lips together as the ice melts to pieces in Ryu's mouth, as Ryu melts to pieces, as Hayato burns, burns, burns.


End file.
